It can be difficult to troubleshoot drive malfunctions in mass data storage systems for a number of reasons. The success of troubleshooting often depends upon the availability of accurate drive activity records; yet, drive users may not ‘know’ or have any records in leading up to a reported drive failure. In some cases, a drive maintenance specialist may be asked to visit a mass data storage facility to collect system diagnostic information. For example, the specialist may visit a data center and attach a piece hardware known as a “bus analyzer” between a host and a grouping of storage drives to log certain events, such as host commands and associated timing information. The viability and usefulness of bus analyzers is limited by the number of physical connection ports on each bus analyzer. Since bus analyzers couple to a limited number of storage drives (e.g., up to four connections), several bus analyzers may be employed simultaneously or one-by-one to collect a meaningful amount of data from a large number of storage drives in a storage system. Additionally, bus analyzers may inherently introduce latencies and disrupt timing of data flows within the system.
The use of bus analyzers is further complicated by recent trends in compact data storage. In many cases, storage drives are physically coupled in such tight drive-to-drive proximity that individual drive input ports are not available or difficult to access and/or service. As a result, these systems can make it difficult or physically impossible to couple a bus analyzer in the traditional manner. Further still, some high-security data storage sites prohibit visitation by outside maintenance personnel. For example, users of a data center may prohibit on-site analytics collection and request that the manufactures of the storage hardware perform all troubleshooting remotely.